It seems the Ameican Civil Liberties Union continues to cherry-pick which rights they find defensible and which they don’t:
The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.
This is pretty strange for an organization that claims absolutism for other enumerated rights, as well as seeking clemency for convicted murderers and sex offenders.
It’s somewhat ironic that the logistic problems inherent in the Iowa law closely mirror the geographical problems of the Gun-Free School Zones Act.
So, why does the 2nd Amendment get treated like a red-headed stepchild? Let’s look at their founder’s views:
I am for Socialism, disarmament and ultimately, for the abolishing of the State itself … I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.
Roger Baldwin loved Communism. For him, it was Utopia. In 1934, he had his face rubbed in the abuses of the Soviet regime, and still, he supported the system:
I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons – the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it.
—Soviet Russia Today, original copy researched by Eugene Volokh [pdf]
I’d say that Stalin’s extermination of 20 million of his own citizens during his regime counts as more than just “some suppression.” (*)
Though Baldwin and the ACLU in general would retreat from this position a bit over the following decade, their course was set.
Today, the ACLU is a leviathan in the media. Their assets in 2007 totaled $255,772,442. They count among their greatest supporters George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($4,949,080 since 1998), the Tides Foundation ($1,213,477 since 2004), the multi-billion dollar Hewlett Foundation ($1,300,000) and of course, the Joyce Foundation ($225,000 between 2002-2004).
They’re not a “civil liberties” organization, they’re a political lobbying machine for leftist causes with big budgets. The next time someone complains about the NRA’s lobbying tactics, look an the money they’re up against.
(*) That’s not a wartime figure. Those are civilians murdered by their own government. Rummel places the figure as high as 61 million for the Soviet regime. Had the subject peoples not been systematically disarmed, such atrocities would not be possible.